Provider: Resilliance Alliance
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TY - JOUR
A1 - Ango, Tola Gemechu
A1 - Börjeson, Lowe
A1 - Senbeta, Feyera
A1 - Hylander, Kristoffer
TI - Balancing Ecosystem Services and Disservices: Smallholder Farmers’ Use and Management of Forest and Trees in an Agricultural Landscape in Southwestern Ethiopia
N2 - Farmers’ practices in the management of agricultural landscapes influence biodiversity with implications for livelihoods, ecosystem service provision, and biodiversity conservation. In this study, we examined how smallholding farmers in an agriculture-forest mosaic landscape in southwestern Ethiopia manage trees and forests with regard to a few selected ecosystem services and disservices that they highlighted as “beneficial” or “problematic.” Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from six villages, located both near and far from forest, using participatory field mapping and semistructured interviews, tree species inventory, focus group discussions, and observation. The study showed that farmers’ management practices, i.e., the planting of trees on field boundaries amid their removal from inside arable fields, preservation of trees in semimanaged forest coffee, maintenance of patches of shade coffee fields in the agricultural landscape, and establishment of woodlots with exotic trees result in a restructuring of the forest-agriculture mosaic. In addition, the strategies farmers employed to mitigate crop damage by wild mammals such as baboons and bush pigs, e.g., migration and allocation of migrants on lands along forests, have contributed to a reduction in forest and tree cover in the agricultural landscape. Because farmers’ management practices were overall geared toward mitigating the negative impact of disservices and to augment positive services, we conclude that it is important to operationalize ecosystem processes as both services and disservices in studies related to agricultural landscapes.
JO - Ecology and Society
PB - The Resilience Alliance
Y1 - 2014
P1 - 2014
VL - 19
IS - 1
C7 - 30
UR - http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol19/iss1/art30/
DO - 10.5751/ES-06279-190130
KW - agricultural landscape
KW - biodiversity
KW - ecosystem services and disservices
KW - Ethiopia
KW - farmer practices
KW - forest
KW - Gera
KW - trees
ER -